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Long Live Web 1.0
by Z. S. Stalls
31 October 2025
~1,400 words (6min read)
When I was a teenager in the early 2000s and the World Wide Web was in its prime, I thought it was awesome that so many people made their own websites from scratch using basic HTML (mine was about Lego robots). They were simple and lacked the bells and whistles of today's social media platforms and web content management systems, but they had character. Each one was a unique labor of love and an expression of true individualism. There were no addicting algorithms, no feeds to doomscroll, no constant comparing of each other's likes and followers--just people being themselves and checking out each other's content on their own terms. The emphasis was on the user using the service, not the service using the user.
People found each other's websites by word of mouth or searching the Internet for their interests. Beyond basic features like guestbooks and visitor counters, there was very little interactivity, much less any manipulation of it. It was like a public library where everyone could have their own book, searchable mostly by type and quality of content. Number of visitors mattered, but abuse of search engine optimization hadn't become widespread yet. Now, that library is more like a popularity contest in a middle school cafeteria, where everyone stares at an artificially inflated leaderboard all day.
During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, I suffered a mental health crisis and dropped off of social media completely. A job forced me back onto Facebook to manage a writers' group for a while, but that didn't last long. As my own voice as a writer further developed, I felt an increasing need to express myself, but I couldn't stand returning to the banality of social media. These platforms are truly in a race to the bottom to find the lowest common denominators of content that will keep people engaged.
Plenty of users' content isn't junk, but it's like walking through all the clearance aisles at Walmart to find organic carrots. Sure, the carrots are probably somewhere in the store, but we get so distracted by colorful products at unbelievable prices that we forget why we are at the store in the first place. If a shiny thingamajig that we were unaware of a second ago fulfills a desire that we did not previously have, then is that item a good deal or an exploitation? Today's social media platforms are no different.
The Internet should be (and once was) a tool for people to disseminate and discover ideas, but it has become a tool for its facilitators to control the masses. There isn't even a particular ideological end in mind--just giving us whatever keeps us scrolling so that a few C-suites can rake in billions from advertisers paying for our attention. (I don't consider "making money" to be an ideology. Capitalism is at best a problematic means and never an end.)
Perhaps the worst aspect of today's information landscape is how dumb it has made everyone. Specifically, people are unaware that they are unaware. When they start to become aware of their lack of understanding, they don't seem to care. I have spent the last year as a writing tutor working with American middle school, high school, and college students, so allow me to not mince my words when I say that Gen Alpha and most Gen Z kids are absolutely fucked. Their parents are not far behind.
I don't blame the kids because it's not their fault. Millennials and boomers have selfishly welcomed in personalized black mirrors for everyone, so their kids and grandkids never stood a chance. When older generations decide they no longer need to know if there is a difference between "twice as much" and "100% more," their children will never learn this at all, nor will they care to. The goddamn President is telling people that he has cut prescription drug prices by over 1,000%: "I don't mean 50%. I mean 1,400, 1,500%."
Recently, I tutored a college student who could not produce a quotation mark in a word processor. First, he asked if a parenthesis was a quotation mark. Then, he asked if a colon was a quotation mark. We were using a source from the Harvard Kennedy School, which he spelled as "Harvald Candy school." He spent a solid 10 minutes of our hour-long appointment texting, and he repeatedly told me that he wanted to do as little work as possible to finish the assignment. The problem is most obvious among young people, but I have had similar experiences with older students. Don't even get me started on the use (and even encouragement) of AI in schools right now.
Education in the United States has been going downhill since the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, when schools were forced to focus on standardized testing to determine who gets a high school diploma, which clearly has not coincided with raising actual learning outcomes or academic standards. This has been bad enough on its own. Coupled with our addiction to garbage content that has been dumbed down and tailored just for us (and often by us), accessible 24/7 by anyone with thumbs, we are in an intellectual crisis.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), high school graduation rates went up 7 percentage points between 2012 and 2022. At roughly the same time, between 2014 and 2023, NCES's Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies found that the percentages of adults performing at the lowest levels of literacy and numeracy increased from 18 to 28% and 28 to 34% respectively. Correlation does not imply causation, but the Pew Research Center reported that smartphone ownership in the United States rose from 35% in 2011 to 91% in 2024. There is an elephant in the room, and his name is Mark Zuckerberg.
I have grown significantly as a writer over the past few years, but I have also languished, spinning pages of critiques that ultimately went nowhere because I felt there was no audience for them. I have a professional portfolio to showcase writing samples, but I don't think saying things like "my fellow Americans are morons, and everyone should delete their social media accounts" will land me a job these days. Substack piqued my interest, but I was immediately disillusioned by its Twitter-like feed of users saying how nice it is that Substack is not like other social media rabbit holes. Although I commend the platform's creators for allowing users to email long-form content directly to subscribers, I don't really see much daylight between Substack and other social media platforms.
Eventually, I came to the realization that I can just create my own platform, like in the good ol' days of Web 1.0, and that having an audience to interact with is largely irrelevant to writing. Probably only a few people will read what I have to say, but the point of writing is to express oneself, not to express what others want to hear. I can write (almost) whatever I want on some tech company's platform, but these environments are intrinsically antithetical to self-expression. There are thousands of examples of writers throughout history who produced their best work relatively cut off from the influence of others. I am unaware of any who chose to write from the stage of a public theater, constantly surrounded by their audience in the way that so many writers are today.
My website is my website, and it's exactly what I want it to be, nothing more and nothing less. Apart from a guestbook to sign, the only way for you and I to interact is by emailing me at zach@zachswebsite.com. If you have a website similar to mine or write content similar to mine, I would probably like to hear about it. If you want to interact with other people, go outside. When you come back inside, delete your social media accounts and start your own website. You can't "like" or comment on anything on my site, but you can subscribe to my occasional newsletter. If you really like my writing, you can choose to support it financially.
Although Zach is my real first name, I publish under the pen name Z. S. Stalls because I'm a procrastinator who shares his real full name with a professional baseball player. If you ever see this name in a publication that costs money, please pay for that publication, but I personally won't mind if you don't because stealing words isn't stealing--it's reading. People today need quality information like the peasants of the French Revolution needed bread, and I'd rather you eat stolen bread than free cake because that shit is rotting everyone's brains.
Like what you've read? Support my writing by tipping as little as $0.50 USD. Or don't. Money's not real, man.